Reprieve is a weird case of a card having 6 different arts across multiple sets and yet never having an in-universe paper printing with a normal frame. This art only came about because of Through the Omenpaths, Magic Arena's replacement for Spider-Man before WotC was able to secure digital distribution rights

Hopefully it and the many other in-universe arts that came from the set get paper printings!

I love when card art gets surreal and fantastical like this

Who knows if this actually means that they're making actual progress on this. Between this and the Netflix series it feels like they've had projects in development hell forever

On one hand, this mouse deck was a terror in standard. On the other, you just can't help but love the art of this little guy

Seeing an announcement about boosters gives me a knee jerk reaction of "what now?" but overall I think these changes are pretty minor and slightly positive. But also I really don't care for foil commons/uncommons so losing them for Japan Showcase arts and increased chances of a rare/mythic sounds good to me. Don't care about collector boosters either so them losing 3 cards doesn't really matter to me

Add another art to the eye horror list with Deathmark and Fevered Visions

You can also get it out early with Geode Golem, but that's the only way to cheat it out in colorless I believe

Going straight into my Kathril deck for sure!

Vigorbloom is kinda horrifying all around

So without the Phyrexians, Koth would have just been a happy dad hanging out with his kid on a farm...

Instead... Poor guy...

I'm not sure if they were listening to their player base or just listening to the money. With Alchemy being unpopular and requiring extra art + dev time I can't imagine they had any incentive to keep it going if no one was buying in.

I have to imagine once Pioneer gets the full card pool play may go up a bit?

Are there any major decks that are actually missing cards? I figured that they had added pretty much all tournament-relevant cards. But I think the bigger thing for online Pioneer would be more support for paper Pioneer to spur interest in the format.

I think we all figured this was coming, Alchemy has never been super popular, even when it was originally introduced, and the extra burden of commissioning art and designing/testing cards is probably not worth the effort now that there are 6-7 Standard releases a year.

There's also the fact that there wasn't really a meaningful reason for digital-only cards to exist. Yes, there are effects that only work or are only practical in digital-only formats. But there's not enough designs that are sufficiently impactful or differ significantly from non-digital mechanics to justify making new cards with every set.

Is the benefit of perpetual lasting in the graveyard/hand/library good enough to justify using it over the much more supported +1/+1 counters? Does conjuring a card really feel that different from creating a token copy of a card? The only mechanic that felt like it was truly doing something interesting and fresh were Drafting cards from Spellbooks, but the massive variety of cards made it hard for your opponents to predict what cards you had. I feel like revealing the card you drafted would have alleviated this issue. I think there were also some good uses of Seek, Intensity and Conjure, but not enough to overcome the burden of acquiring new cards for another format

Rebalanced cards sounded great in concept, but the reality of having to remember two cards with the same name and art but slightly different stats/effects was just confusing. Glad that they're reverting all changes in Arena going forward.

Ultimately, Alchemy was a solution in search of a problem. Sure at the time it was introduced there weren't as many formats and the meta was slower, but simply working on adding more existing cards/formats probably would have been a better use of their time. And eventually those problems solved themselves anyways.